House Rules

Rules are boring but we have to have them so that nobody sues us or anything nasty. Please remember that all rules go for everyone – scientists included!

Rule 1 – no usernames, messages, questions, answers or anything that is offensive in a racist, sexist, sexual or nasty way. If you do it once you won’t get to do again because we’ll remove your access to the site. Offensive usernames will result in accounts being deleted. Sorry.

Rule 3 – if we take a message off the site it’s because we didn’t like it for some reason. We don’t have to explain why, but it’s our necks on the line if you’re telling lies or trying to cause trouble.

Rule 4 – scientists may be asked the same questions lots of times. That will be boring for everyone so we will take out repeat questions and just add later questioners names to the first one.

Rule 5 – students need to give us their email address to have a chance to win vouchers. By giving us your address you are agreeing to receive emails about this event and this event alone. We don’t sell email addresses to anyone.

Rule 6 – if a student asks a really fab question we might publish it.

Rule 7 – we can’t foresee everything so we may make up some rules as we go. We will be as fair as we can and we’ll post the rules here.

So that it’s more fair, there’s some rules for us (the people running the site) too.

We Promise:-

We will always try to be fair. Our main aim is giving young people a say in science, but that doesn’t mean we have to be po-faced, worthy, or that we can’t have fun.

We will never block questions because they are challenging, only if they are offensive, duplicates or don’t make any sense. We can’t make scientists answer them if they don’t want to though.

In Live Chat we will block people for being disruptive, aggressive or offensive to other people. Sometimes, when it’s very busy, we also have to block people if they are constantly chatting amongst themselves, so that the people who DO want to talk to the scientists get a chance. If we are going to do this we will give at least two warnings.